While a honeybee colony has a single queen and multiple female workers of equal rank, paper wasp colonies are home to multiple reproductive females, called foundresses, which compete for dominance.

In such a situation, TI would help wasps make quick deductions about social interactions.

This means they can build and manipulate an implicit hierarchy, helping them to live in the colony, the press release said.

"Our findings suggest that the capacity for complex behavior may be shaped by the social environment in which behaviors are beneficial, rather than being strictly limited by brain size," said Tibbetts, who has been researching wasp behavior for 20 years.

Gavin Broad, Principal Curator in Charge (Insects) at the Natural History Museum in London, agrees with these conclusions.

"The paper wasps in the study are more flexible than many wasps (or indeed honey bees) in their ability to transition from being workers to queens," Broad told CNN via email.

"So dominance hierarchies are important to these paper wasps as the workers can become the queens, whereas a worker honey bee can never become a queen."

Broad also pointed out that wasp society is entirely female, and males don't contribute to social dynamics.

Tibbetts told CNN via email that the next step is to study how wasps use TI in social interactions, including figuring out their relative strength without fighting a rival.

"For example, if a wasp saw Jane win a fight with Lisa and that wasp had previously won a fight with Jane, the wasp could infer that she could probably beat Lisa," said Tibbetts, who added that other animals use TI in this way during social interactions.

In a previous study, Tibbetts showed paper wasps can recognize variations in facial markings and are more aggressive toward wasps with unfamiliar markings.

And another piece of her research found the insects use memories of previous social interactions with other wasps to determine their behavior, relying on surprisingly long memories.